Part I: Fraud in Affiliate Networks

As David Montague, founder and president of the The Fraud Practice said jokingly at the Performance Marketing Leadership Summit this November (hosted by Mark Roth of Offervault): “Fraud is the second oldest business known to man.” As hard as affiliate networks try to improve measures to improve the quality of their publishers, there are some that will always sneak through. These days especially, with diet and weight loss continuity offers that only require a consumer to pay a nominal shipping and handling charge, gift card fraud is still prevalent no matter what measures advertisers take to block BIN ranges. Another huge source of fraud are leadgen offers, which do not require a credit card. Adfinity has taken a few measures to improve their publisher quality:

1. We do not take international publishers, period.

2. We require a phone interview with every publisher, as well as a verified email address.

3. We require a minimum of three references from other affiliate networks or other reputable businesses.

4. We have a zero-tolerance fraud policy. We do not give publishers a second chance if they generate fraudulent traffic.

In addition to these policies, we strictly monitor publisher’s traffic, which leads to part 2.

Part II: Catching the Bad Apple Early

While I was going through our traffic logs today, here is what I found for one particular affiliate running an EDU campaign:

Considering his name is akin to John Smith in terms of the “American sounding blandness” many fraudsters use, I assumed it was a fraudulent international publisher with phone forwarding, or an American constituent who sold his account.

I asked the publisher how he was driving traffic. He told me “PPC.” Considering the traffic log showed all the email originated from Yahoo Mail, I instantly assumed the guy had no idea what he was talking about. He admitted to using a service called Powersignups (which I won’t link to in order to avoid giving them extra backlinks), where he paid for 1,000 leads up front for a dollar each. Doing more research, I came across their website. What they basically do is fill out lead gen offers with fake information, based on the affiliate link someone provides them. And I suspect a lot of the time it is too late for affiliate networks to charge back the leads, especially ones that don’t have their affiliate managers monitor traffic logs.

Moral of the story? MONITOR YOUR TRAFFIC LOGS CLOSELY. In this particular case, what tipped me off was the fact the conversion ratio (leads/clicks) was almost 1:1. But I may have overlooked it if it was a more believable conversion like 10%. Here’s some screenshots of the website in case it gets DDoS’ed soon.

What are some measures you take to ensure your publisher’s, or your own traffic is clean? Leave a comment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb4G8Ad8GTU

You are an intelligent, attractive, computer savvy marketing-minded female. You have a very sexy but sophisticated secretary look.

Job requirements.
You must be able to type, blog, research and be very open to bizarre requests, including office games such as:
“What’s she wearing behind the desk?”
“Filing in the bottom drawer again, and again”
“Don’t punish me, I lost the the account!”

Please send pics and a short cover letter describing why this position might be appealing to you.

Actresses and Artists welcome.

Motivated web savvy and interested in marketing? This is for you.

Good luck!

1. pizza
2. music
3. family guy
4. 2008
5. sleeping
6. barack obama
7. society
8. twilight
9. house
10. guinness
11. beach
12. reading
13. friends
14. other
15. simpsons
16. chocolate
17. nutella
18. greys anatomy
19. dormir
20. football
21. liberal
22. university
23. obama
24. click
25. rock

1. Split Test

Making multiple copies of your ads is key in order for you to know what your winners are. I don’t use Tracking202/Prosper202, just subid’s and Facebook’s reporting feature.

Some things I change are:

Headline, Image, Body, Gender, Age, State, Country (for campaigns that allow international), and most importantly keywords (you can find the top 100 keywords in a later post).

2. Look At Other Ads

Other ads, especially if you notice a trend in how long they stay up on the ad board, are a good way to gauge the features that make a successful ad. Sure, there might be an idiot pouring money into bad ad copy but generally it’s the high converting ads that stay up for days at a time. You can even go as far as creating another Facebook profile with a different gender or age to see who else people are targeting.

3. Don’t Look at Other Ads

While looking at ads is great, stay original. Services like Visual Thesaurus allow you to easily come up with broad concepts, instead of being confined by adcopy someone else may have created. Don’t assume what everyone else has works, because chances are they are just experimenting like you.

4. Go Against The Crowd

You’d think that nighttime works best for dating campaigns? Well, I’ve actually seen the opposite. The truth is, besides split testing demographics and keywords, time of month, week, and ESPECIALLY day is crucial. Let me repeat that: time of day is crucial to how your adcopy performs. Not only that, but you’ll pay less per click at night.

5. Travel Abroad

Clicks are cheap internationally. An EDU campaign might bank you 5% ROI in the states, but 50% ROI if it’s a Canadian campaign. Experiment with the UK, Russia, even China. Google Translate is the best way to get high quality translation for low cost.